skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a question that's been bothering me for quite a while. I'd be really thankful if someone could help me as I'm going to use MongoHQ for a project, but... I just don't get their service.

Let's say you're building a kinda RESTful API for yourself - for example, you're an online store and have a database for your users. Now you want to create an iOS client that talks to your server and after authentication and a lot of app logic (implemented in your server), the server responds to the client (by sending it a few JSON's, like user info and shopping history) and the client can send JSON's to the server, too (when the user changes something).

Traditionally, you'd implement the server logic in some language and deploy it on your machine, and start a database daemon on that machine (or another machine within your realm). You'd set them up to work with each other, and then you'd spend the rest of your time maintaining them! It's hard and requires a lot of knowledge, but the DB and server where "near" each other (physically) and your bottleneck was usually CPU/RAM, not network latency.

But now, the "cool" way is to write a rails/Node.js/... server and deploy it to heroku/nodejitsu/others and "borrow" a database from mongohq/redistogo/iriscouch/etc. NodeJitsu manages your Node.js app, and MongoHQ, your DB. They both do them much better than you, and everything seems nice.

But, now when a client asks the server for something, Node.js has to ask MongoHQ, which is God-knows-where and could easily take up to 300-500ms (or so I think). Then your server has to do its magic and do authentication and custom app logic and then respond back to the user.

And it's for Mongo, which is a database. How the hell "RedisToGo', for example, works? Redis is supposed to be extremely fast and performant. A redis store that it takes 400ms just to connect to it? It doesn't make sense.

----

I'd be thankful if someone could "educate" me - I really don't get these PAAS things.

I'm thinking of creating an app that's (probably) going to be on NodeJitsu and uses MongoHQ, but I'm really doing that with closed eyes, and it'll not an educated choice - the only reason I probably won't self-host them is because I've had bad experience with security stuff (a Linux VPS that someone broke into easily, and I don't have a clue how that happened!)
A note to all creators — coders, designers, entrepreneurs
Virtually all business go through an early life-cycle with the oft-talked about "trough of sorrow", AKA "desperation". Some make it past this stage and succeed, most fail miserably. Why would anyone think desperation is something that they have to (or even could) introduce themselves? Or that it would be a success factor, when it is something virtually every business experiences at some point naturally (and the vast majority fail anyway)?

Also, this is a very first world definition of "desperation".
Awesome work, guys! Thanks for sharing. I wish you went with my suggestion for bootstarter.js...
Ask HN: What can markets compute?
Markets generate efficient solutions to enormously complex allocation and optimization problems by aggregating distributed information and sending price signals. What else can they compute? What are their computational properties? Are market systems Turing-complete or universal in some other sense? What is the most interesting research on this subject?
A couple months ago, I had added "kickstarter widget for start-up websites" to my list of ideas that I never do, but think are cool. This is a really wonderful open-source contribution, so hat tip!

We also ordered a Lockitron for our office already. We have keypads on our house, and we love them, and imagine Lokcitron will be even more love.
PEN support! YES! How could I have overlooked that one!
It seems the platform doesn't open until early 2013.
non-print version: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain...
I bet if you pinned a tail on that plan, you could call it a weasel!
General Assembly offering 3 "Unicorn" Scholarships
Reading through the list of unix rules you linked, I find git reasonably obeys them.

For example "Clarity is better than cleverness": Git provides a clear internal structure (Blob DAG). It does not try to provide clever merge algorithms, since "Buying a small increase in performance with a large increase in the complexity and obscurity of your technique is a bad trade".

Or another example "Design programs to be connected with other programs". In contrast to Mercurial, many git commands are separate programs and it is trivial to implement your own in any language.

Arguably git violates "In interface design, always do the least surprising thing", since it does not try to provide a comfy start for svn exiles.
And, of course, who could forget Bruce Wayne? :)
Hehe indeed.
Amazon EC2.

The latency is minimal because it's all happening on Amazon EC2's stack, at least, should be in order to be performant.

In the case of Heroku/MongoHQ it's both on Amazon EC2.
I still believe there is room for a proper platform to manage crowdfunding for hardware - maybe with a distributed option as well.
To really perform well, applications do need to be written with the underlying database in mind. The popularity of ORM-based data access layers has duped a lot of folks into believing that you don't have to think too much about the database.
The big commercial 3d-printer companies (like Stratasys, Z-Systems, Objet) already use that model; you buy consumables from them at a rather higher than commodity price.
You misunderstand the question posed: who has more power? For instance, all entrepreneurs need customers, but not all customers need entrepreneurs. So, customers have more power to change the world? Of course not.
It was less than a month ago that Amazon started charging sales tax in California, which is the deal that will allow them to open distribution centers in California. So give them some time and the Bay Area will probably be added to that list.
A Hacked Portal Gun Replica 'Levitates' a Companion Cube
Isn't Google Play Magazines much different than Newstand? As I understand it Newstand is more of a folder and a framework for periodical applications, while Google Play Magazine is more akin to Google Books or Kindle in which you deliver content to them in a specific format and their application displays that content.

If I'm not wrong, Newstand allows for much more control of the user experience since you build the application yourself.
The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung to actually be useful in the real world. You get to the 80% point and then all of a sudden you realize that to do the next thing you need one little hack here. Now you get to 85% and you realize you need one more little hack, then at 88% you need another little hack to make it speedy, ...
Office 2013 reaches RTM, general availability planned for Q1 2013
Nice! Thanks for the quick update.
There is an exploit made possible by returning 'unwrapped' json in response to GET's. This details it fairly nicely: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/20/anatomy-of-a-subtle-js...
Damn it! You just ruined my startup weekend idea!
I put together an implementation of their simple model at:

http://insightmaker.com/insight/2972

You can play with the different parameters and growth rates in this model to see the results. It wouldn't be much harder to add the features of their other models.
There's plenty left to do:

"We've kept Selfstarter really simple, but that also means that you should beef it up with your own authentication, administration and product management code."
Ballisticality has a lot less to do with sustaining the trajectory than attaining a minimal orbital velocity, or escape velocity.

NB: Ballisticality isn't a word. Pity.
Is the "Fork Now" button supposed to go to a Lockitron preorder page?

EDIT>> Apparently only the second fork button does this...the one I clicked after reading the page content :)
PH7: An Embeddable PHP(5.3) Engine
I remember a quote about entrepreneurship which I would paraphrase as "It's not hope for success that provides the best motivation, it's fear of failure."
I tried a few drawings just for fun. Success seemed to correlate with how photo-real the artist's style happened to be. But is this recognition? (Other than for male/female.)
Now to try it with complex numbers and/or 3D coordinates.
I am a hardcore rails guy, but for some reason using sinatra for this app, would be a better option.
> Do I have to manually break lines that get longer than 80 characters (or whatever my limit is)? Am I supposed to turn soft word wrap on?

In most situations, there should be some sort of semantic break in your sentences every 80 characters or less. (It may not be demarcated with a comma.) If there isn't, you may want to consider reworking those sentences for clarity.
A good friend worked for a Valley start-up in the late-90s boom. Wasn't too sure about the organization, and yes, there were some sketchy people there.

Turns out, though, that the founder was funding payroll out of his own pocket for the last couple of months. Subsequent datapoints suggest he's a good (if occasionally odd) egg.

Trust in the Valley is a very scarce commodity, but it can be found.

Zynga? I have to say I saw it coming from miles away.
If he had only criticized a monolithic kernel and not general ideas in general, then I would not have criticized him. But he takes a single example of an allegedly failed general approach, and then takes a wild leap to the conclusion that all such methodologies are hopeless to try.

The irony is that it's Torvalds who is leaping to wild and unjustified generalizations.
Demystifying Garbage Collectors
That's a massive oversimplification that ignores that everyone who has changed the world had lots of help doing it.

Larry and Sergey changed the world. I suspect that their path was significantly easier because they had help from Andy Bechtolsheim, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz - to say nothing of Craig Silverstein, Urs Hoezle, Amit Patel, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Paul Buchheit, Marissa Mayer, and the hundreds of other early Google employees.
The problem is that even the most beautiful and simple solutions end up turning into a big pile of dung

Until they don't. You don't know what who is going to come up with next.
Wow, this is cool :)

Mind if I add a link to it from the post?
Ask HN: Does this company have unrealistic hiring expectations?
I recently saw this Ad for iOS developer on Stack Overflow.

Here is what they are looking for in the skills:

Skills & Requirements

NETWORKING: Strong understanding of mobile networking best practices: request limiting, request caching, batching, content aggregation, minification, integrating with rest and tcp/udp services, etc.

PERFORMANCE: Expert performance profiler: understands the importance of optimizing for speed, memory usage and end-user responsiveness.

CONCURRENCY: Comfortable using asynchronous, multi-threaded, parallel programming paradigms and other techniques to maximize UI responsiveness.

USERINTERFACE: You know how to make the unthinkable happen: long data lists, and thousands of images don’t scare you. Animations are cake.

APIs: You know all the APIs inside and out. Your knowledge of obscure parameters scares authors of technical books.

I was fine till the User Interface related requirements. But they lost me and kind of scared me by their last requirement about heroic API knowledge!

What do you think ?
This is one of the most beautiful things I think I've ever seen simulated. Kudos!
Way to hack off the end of my sentence which is the most important part.
[video] Imagine a smarter San Francisco
Good catch!

I just pushed a fix.
I'd really love to jump on EC2, but every time I run the numbers it doesn't add up for my usage.

I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php.

Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances.

It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.
The direction is not the opposite for science. In Popper's philosophy of science, you form a theory beforehand and specify how it can be falsified, only then you do the experiment. Otherwise you could obtain some data and provide an ad-hoc explanation, without knowing whether it really explains anything. It's related to the Texas sharpshooters fallacy, where you shoot a gun and only afterwards draw the bull's eye around your shots. Of course practice differs from this ideal, you do get inspired to make certain theories by data (context of discovery), but to make a proper theory you need to make predictions and specify what would disprove the theory (context of justification).
Paul - You are certainly describing something important but your narrower definition of startup conflicts with the prior definition as being a company that is searching for a repeatable and scalable business model (http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...). I am doing exactly this but I won't gamble on seeing growth sufficient to interest a VC.

What you seem to have identified in 'Startup = Growth' is a subset of the startup ecosystem more akin to 'wildcatting.' Both wildcatters and the ventures you seek risk capital from domain experts. These wildcatting risks and rewards are huge as you know better than most.

Maybe a more dignified word than 'wildcatting' can be found but 'startup' is taken.
AquatiCo project would let anyone control a real submarine from their computer
Do you remember the "Sea Quest 2032" series from the '90s? This seems to be the beginning of that future...
Three Not-So-Obvious Metrics You Should Be Tracking
Ask Stripe: How have you managed your execution and releases so well? It's inspiring, though I'm wondering what core function or role in the organization allows this? I imagine it's a team effort with an overall vision that everyone is fully aware of and contributing to. Is it that simple?
ATM machines email you a confirmation when you deposit cash or cheques.
Thanks! That cleared everything.

Here's a link from MongoHQ's support that I found (being more knowledgeable after your response!) that say NodeJitsu is also in US East Coast and the transfer should (ideally) be fast: http://support.mongohq.com/topics/general/mongohq-take-advan...

:)
Eisenstadt went on a bit of extended speculation there.
Having parents tends to create a secure environment that leads to middling experience. Losing that doesn't make you work harder, it just takes away a "normal" life and leads you to find your way elsewhere -- either up or down (as SatvikVeri correctly observes.)
Motivation for the entrepreneur. :v
A lot of hater comments on the article, most bashing the IAP model. I wonder what would be a proper/good model, given the volatility of the platform (no one plays the same game for long) and the average low price...

Random thoughts anyone?
Thanks for releasing this. The design works well for single-product offerings, though would need to be modified for pledge-reward setups.. not too hard to do though.
Or you could just set your line wrap margin pretty low, e.g. 50 or 60 characters, and then when you edit don't re-wrap. Requires less thinking about where to break lines, while still keeping most changes localized to a line and thus cleaner diffs.
How can anyone be developing an app for iOS and NOT know that their only distribution channel (aside from jailbreaking) is the App Store?
Haha, like any employee would answer NO with their name emblazoned on the post.
Ask HN: Is there a service for 'renting' devs time to help program?
Hi,

Sometimes I get stuck on a development problem or just want to ask someone. Sometimes, asking on stackoverflow and forums are not enough especially if you have to debug through the problem and show where the crash happens. However, someone experienced might point it out in an hour or two. Is there a service where I can pay a developer by the hour and remotely work out the issue?

If not, do you think that there is a market for a service like that?

Thanks!
The reason for this appears to be that elegant solutions do not survive contact with the real world.

When someone comes to you with an inelegant hack that makes her database benchmark run 20% faster, you can either accept it and sacrifice some of your elegance, or your can reject it on elegance grounds and sacrifice some of your relevance.
Eric Brewer on Advancing Distributed Systems
Live in 20 minutes.
That's the science you like. There's plenty of science without sweeping ideas. There will likely always be.
Well, in aggregate, yes, the customer's have the most power to change the world. The world can't change without people driving the change. A new company's success is directly tied to how many customers need what the company is selling.

Customers have the power to buy a solution. VCs have the power to fund a solution. An entrepreneur figures out what customers need and a way to provide that. And at the same time, also figures out how to get this venture funded. It's their position at the intersection, connecting the otherwise-unconnected dots, that gives them the power to really make something big happen.

EDIT: perhaps a better way of expressing what I'm trying to say is that taking the step to become an entrepreneur after seeing a problem is the most direct way to try to actually change the status quo and fix that problem.
GeddyJS: the original MVC Node framework adds Mongo-style queries for any DB
As far as I'm aware OpenCL performance, while portable, is still somewhat inferior to that of straight CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs, hence my CUDA suggestion. I didn't actually look at the algorithms used in either so I can't comment, perhaps I'll do that tomorrow. What do you mean by using an FFT "for" a convolution? The algorithm is convolving the (presumably 2D) FFT of the game board with a disk filter?
Could you elaborate on this, please? I can't find much on the topic.

Edit: The Filepicker.io email seems to indicate a PKI-style solution, but I can only sort of guess at the implementation.
Title made me think of my dating, made me chuckle.
This is so awesome -- have the Kickstarter guys contacted you? I wonder how they take this, and what this means for the entire crowd-funding space for that matter, especially the smaller ones that don't have the network effects of Kickstarter.

I just did a project on Fundrazr last month. If only this was available then.. kudos!
Ask HN: Do you write unit testing when creating a new product?
When you're working on a new product, you want to move fast and release an MVP as soon as you can. This contradicts with the practice to create unit tests for all your code, since unit test code can easily take up 50% of your code base. So my question is: do you write unit tests for your new products? And if not, do you take test-ability into account (i.e. by using dependency injection)?
Great tutorial.

Since you're already using backbone.js why not plug in CSRF protection with Flask-SeaSurf?
(http://flask.pocoo.org/extensions/)

If you use this backbone.js change then CSRF is practically invisible:
https://github.com/alanhamlett/backbone/commit/91941afe693ae...

Also, if building an api with Flask make sure you use blueprints with a url prefix so your api routes become relative, which means less typing:
http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/blueprints/
Many thanks for that!
One thing I personally realised is that App Engine is absolutely fantastic for my needs, but as soon as my sites are outside of the free quota the costs rise extremely fast almost putting them out of price range before they even got started.

The other thing for me is that I have now spent time and invested hours into learning the App Engine platform but I get almost nothing in return since moving requires me to re-write or re-learn other tools anyway.

Unless I was a 100% committed to App Engine I don't want to launch a new project on top of it.
Occam's razor is merely a heuristic, not a part of the scientific method. Its usefulness is debated in philosophy of science, and also in a practical sense in the context of machine learning; their conclusion is that it could very well be false.
Are you accepting Angel Funding? I'll send you a WHOLE BOX of Ramen for 10% equity.
When you fail and the depression knocks , make sure you have enough to see a psychiatrist
Just to start with the discussion: I don't. I feel like it takes up too much of my valuable time (I'm working on my own, so I need all the time I can get). I do however build my software with test-ability in mind (more or less, I probably have to change multiple things if I really want to unit test my code).
The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency
Looks like Kickstarter is going to end up being known as the company that (kick)started a phenomenon but didn't own it. They should have become a marketplace for projects, not an arbiter of what gets a shot and what doesn't.
I do have a problem with Colin's crusade against duplicates.

You should re-read his comments about duplicates more carefully if you think he is on a crusade.

Here is an excerpt from his most recent comment:

Those who are interested in this subject and want to
discuss it, you may be interested in seeing the points -
good and bad - that have been made on previous occasions
that this has been submitted. Here are a few previous
discussion:

That doesn't look like a crusade against duplicates to me. It looks helpful and I'm glad it's there.
Staff turnover is huge, especially for startups. It can be make or break in the early stages.
I've had this idea for a while but lacked the skills to actually create it.

Glad someone went ahead and made it happen.
Having built a SaaS app that basically means spinning up a new instance for each customer, I reference ec2instances.info almost daily.

I only came into this discussion to post it -- glad to see somebody else already did.
Entrepreneurs, duh. There are lots of ways to get money.
It's barely even different from the digital situation. This is basically taking HDCP and saying "Instead of pictures on a TV, now it's 3d shapes on a printer." Both are digital output devices, one of them just lasts longer than the other.

Plus we already have printing prevention on physical 2D printers, but it's only used to stop paper currency counterfeiting, instead of being for private parties. Never tried it myself, but my understanding is that printers will cut it off and give you a link to http://www.rulesforuse.com instead.
"An entrepreneur is an enterprising individual who builds capital through risk and/or initiative."
According to this definition, a VC is an entrepreneur. If that is the case, then it would seem entrepreneurs would have more power to change the world as VC's are a subset of entrepreneurs. :)